


The Annunciation

by bigblackdog



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Renaissance, Light BDSM, M/M, San Marco Monastery, an overabundance of painting descriptions, anachronistic conceptions of identity come at me, catholic guilt but in like a sexy way, catholic paraphernalia used exactly the way it was intended, hair shirt kink, monks falling in love, signaling using art and literature, thinly veiled commentary on purity politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-07-23 04:20:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 17,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20002222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigblackdog/pseuds/bigblackdog
Summary: Sirius expects nothing but misery when his mother forces him into a monastery under the thumb of Brother Marvolo, the prior whose sensationalist preaching has prompted a fervor for damning "indulgences". And he is miserable. Until he catches sight of the mysterious scullion with gold leaf curls.an r/s italian renaissance au!





	1. chapter one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! here i am, writing about painting again! brother marvolo is modeled after savonarola, the dominican monk that called for the bonfire of vanities and generally terrorized florence for a decade or so before the medici family got really sick of him. 
> 
> i'm posting this as a part of the hp wip-fest, which ends on sept 1! wish me luck!

Sirius seeks shelter on the shaded side of the courtyard and squints out at the tidy square of garden. The afternoon sun is hot and bright in the sky and the courtyard is even brighter for being made of white stone. In a better mood Sirius would be able to appreciate the clean white stone arranged with perfect geometry, but right now, he thinks it's blinding, stupid and foolish, too stark. The orange trees in the center are dusty and dry, leaves curled in on themselves as if they too are waiting for better times. 

These days, with Brother Marvolo holding Florence in an iron grip of chastity and penance, Sirius wonders if his chances of getting out of San Marco's are any better than those trees.  Sirius' mother sent him here with every intention of jailing him and she's done a rather thorough job of it. Her promise of regular donations will insure the Church hangs on to Sirius; Mendicant or not, as long as there's money coming in, Sirius isn't getting out. Sirius could spit on the Pope himself and still be made to take vows.

The whole place is eerily quiet, not even the cicadas disturb quiet hours. Sirius tugs on the collar of his embroidered shirt, a garment never intended for sitting in midday heat. He should be inside, stripping down for a rest, slipping into bed to pass the few sleepy hours before dinner.

Across the courtyard, a man emerges from a shadowed archway and into the sharp shaft of light illuminating the arcade. His hair is probably a few shades darker, probably a rich brown ochre, but in this light the wispy tips of curls are lit up like the saints in ecstasy. His long slender neck is bent just so, golden curls on the nape, and the line of his nose would be such a playful, sweeping slope to trace with charcoal. Sirius' fingers twitch. The man keeps his hands clasped and Sirius longs to see if his fingers are as slender as his neck, if his knuckles are as distinct as his nose, longs for the time and tutelage and materials to draw those knuckles, fingertips pressed into flesh like the twisting statues Sirius saw in Rome.

This vision is abruptly interrupted by two men emerging from the same shadowed doorway, but these men seem to pull the shadows with them. Sirius knows these men. He's seen Brother Marvolo in the pulpit, working himself and everyone else into a fury, he's seen the back of his brown robes sweeping into his mother's receiving room. And with him, Brother Severus, whose ugly twisting scowl wouldn't be out of place on the left side of a Last Judgement painting.

They march over to Sirius, their quick, clipped steps echoing in the empty courtyard; the walk of people hurrying for the sake of it. Brother Marvolo is exaggerating his stiff posture, performing the piety of his hair shirt for all to see, as if everyone didn’t already know of his fervent dedication to flagellation. Brother Severus, standing just behind as always, is barely concealing a smug expression; it’s the happiest Sirius has ever seen him.

Sirius shifts to lean back against a column, his legs splayed.

“ _ Signore _ Black,” Brother Marvolo says, in a deep and smooth voice that Sirius suspects is affected. “How very fortunate for your soul to have joined us.”

Sirius snorts, crossing his arms. 

Brother Marvolo’s lip twists and bares his teeth for a deeply unsettling moment before he schools the expression away and says smoothly, “I must be brief, I'm meeting with Archbishop Malfoy this afternoon. Brother Severus,” Brother Severus glares at Sirius, “will guide you through our way of life here and what is not permitted." Brother Marvolo pauses. "I’m sure it will be... an adjustment.” Brother Marvolo seems immensely pleased at depriving Sirius of all earthly pleasures. 

Sirius lifts his chin, refusing to be impressed by this sanctimonious snake. Brother Marvolo assesses him and says to Severus, "Make sure our new Brother feels  _ most _ welcome." Marvolo turns, wincing slightly, and marches out of the courtyard, sandals clacking loudly like a self-important pony.

Brother Severus looks Sirius up and down with a sneering smile. “Ahh yes, the  _ apprentice _ .” Brother Severus spits out the word like rancid oil.

"Better an apprentice than a lackey." 

Severus' smile widens. "You'll want to be careful,  _ Signore _ . I'm sure this a new concept for you, but here there are consequences for your actions."

Without another word, Severus turns heel and walks quickly down the arcade. Sirius directs a rude hand gesture and a muttered curse at Severus' back and gets up slowly, leisurely, following him at an impertinently sedate pace. By the time Severus is marching up a steep stone staircase, Sirius can feel the anger radiating off him and grins.

As Sirius climbs the stairs however, his grin fades with the budding of a quiet awe. He knows about the frescoes in this monastery; every painter knows them. With each step another sliver of Fra Angelico’s  _ Annunciation _ is revealed, like the careful unbuttoning of a lover's shirt. With each step: the white columned arcade, the very tips of their halos, a glimpse of wings, unfurling, their hands drawing him in, the rich folds of lapis lazuli Sirius wants to press his face to.

At the top step, he rests. An unexpected moment of calm. He looks with a deep welling appreciation upon the Angel Gabriel, Mother Mary, the charged space created by their loving gaze, the space they occupy and fill with light, the little bit of outside world, lush, cultivated and wild all at the same time. 

Severus’ steps have faded away and Sirius hears his own breathing, slow and easy as he looks at the painting: an unlocked opening upon a secret place, far away from this monastery, and Sirius, at the boundary line, invited to stand on the brink of this quiet, illuminated pocket. 

It doesn't last. Severus rounds the corner, hissing admonishments that abruptly drag Sirius back down to this dusty world, filled with men who would walk right past this painting. His feet follow Severus but his eyes trace the graceful arches of the painting until they can't anymore.

At the doorway to Sirius’ cell, Severus shoves coarse brown cloth into his hands.  "It is customary at San Marco's to begin one's postulancy with prayer and fasting. You are to remain here in silent contemplation until I collect you." Severus' smile tells him he's to be left here for longer than is "customary."

Sirius sits heavily on the small cot and looks at the small room he'll apparently be confined to. It’s a square room with a smooth arched ceiling, empty but for a simple bedside table, a pitcher of water, and a book of hours. It would be terrifyingly stark if not for a small blessing, a painted window: a Fra Angelico  _ Annunciation _ . 

This rendering is smaller, less ornate, there's no gold gracing the wings of this Gabriel. There's no lush earthly world. Instead, the arched arcade of the painting extends to the edge, the same color stone as San Marco's, as if you could climb in. Mary kneels, looking young and slight and maybe even unsure. Sirius could almost pretend he's in the workshop, studying the astounding intimacy of it, copying the masters stroke for stroke... if not for the blemish of a monk draped in Dominican brown and white, peering in at the edge of the scene.

He collapses back onto the cot and closes his eyes; there's no charcoal anyway. 


	2. chapter two

As it turns out, Brother Severus does not instruct Sirius on the way of life at San Marco.

Sirius is aware of the Book of Hours, knowing dimly that some people do wake up at 5:00 in the morning to pray and then pray  _ again _ . But he's unaware that he is one of those people now: he sleeps through Lauds and Prime and is made to miss breakfast to make them up. And Sirius knows to keep silent in the Church and refectory, but he doesn't know this rule extends to the dormitories and corridors as well. He also knows not to swear or mock or make lewd jokes but he isn't used to self-monitoring (besides finding it difficult to care). 

That first week, every day is a misstep resulting in cleaning, prayer, more cleaning, more prayer. He's treated like one of the lay brothers, required to refill the brothers' water pitchers, hauling water from the well, beat the tapestries, bedclothes and mattresses, and scrub the floors. So Sirius leaves spiders in Brother Severus' bed when he's replacing the bedclothes, and gets the hot, heavy work of washing the laundry. One of the older monks overhears Sirius muttering about Brother Severus' dog-worm ridden hair while he's washing the chapel floors and he has to empty all the chamber pots.

His body isn't used to this kind of labor. He knows the agitation in his fingers after hours spent pricking a draft upon fresh fresco, but it's nothing like the pain of his cracked knuckles after a day in the lye laundry water. He knows his neck hurting bent over his studies, he knows his arm aching from crushing pigments, but these new aches are wholly different. His knees are red and bruised, his back stiff, his elbows rubbed raw. 

It's miserable and it's lonely. With no one he's allowed to talk to, his days are spent mostly in solitude scrubbing the floors to scrub his sins away. He watches for the man with the golden curls, and sees him once, on the day he's sentenced to laundry. 

Through the door and across a short corridor Sirius could see into the kitchen, where the man was milling grain. Sirius sweating and panting over the hot water, his hair sticking to his neck, watched this man hoist the heavy bags of grain up over his head and turn the crank uninterrupted for hours, his whole body thrown into one smooth motion, one graceful line of tension, his robes falling down to reveal his forearms, tensing relaxing, a lively and gorgeous study in perpetual contrapposto. 

Sirius was mesmerized, but the man never looked up from his task, not even once. But his watching wasn't entirely without reward, Brother Amos came down to call the man to afternoon prayer and he called him  _ Remus _ .

***

Sunday comes. A day of rest even for misbehaved monks, and so Sirius sits down to dinner with the monks for the first time. He scans the hall quickly, looking for anyone who hasn't reprimanded him this week and sees Brother Fabian. He's the very picture of the Dominican monk: portly, jolly, and red-faced like he's had mostly wine for alms. 

Remus isn't here. Neither is Brother Marvolo, and when gently prodded, Brother Fabian tells Sirius Brother Marvolo eats in another room, often with Archbishop Malfoy and Brother Severus.

Sirius then asks where Remus is.

Brother Fabian gives him a long, hard look, and Sirius notices others around them have started to listen in. “Remus eats in the kitchen.” 

“Why’s that? Don’t all the Brothers break bread together?” Sirius asks.

“He is not permitted to take vows,” a man across the table says sharply. 

Brother Fabian frowns at him. “Brother Cornelius,” He entreats.

Brother Cornelius is not softened. “I know your thoughts on the matter and I quite disagree. That boy should never be permitted to take vows. It’s a kindness that he is even allowed to stay here.”

A frail looking old man to Cornelius’ left pipes up in a high voice, “Come now, I’ve know that child his whole life. There is no demon inside him.”

“And the fits?” Cornelius says. “I’ve seen him frothing at the mouth! I’ve seen his eyes glow red as blood!”

Brother Fabian shakes his head sadly. “Each one of us has a cross to bear. Remus deserves our prayers, not our scorn.”

“He endangers us all with his possession!” Brother Cornelius says, and Sirius thinks that if anyone is frothing at the mouth it’s likely to be Brother Cornelius. 

The frail man sits up a little straighter, mastering his voice. “Is that so? Were you here when he arrived? In the twenty years that Remus has lived and worked at this monastery not one among us has succumbed to possession. Perhaps your fear comes from within Brother Cornelius.” 

Brother Cornelius is shocked into silence, looking suitably chastised and focusing rather hard on tearing his bread. The frail old man looks around at each of the monks at the table, cowing them into eating again, the discussion obviously closed. He looks Sirius in the eye, “You will treat Remus with respect or I’ll be speaking to Abbot Dumbledore when he returns,” he says seriously. 

“Of course,” Sirius says, for once, just as seriously.

Brother Fabian breaks the tension at the table. “Brother Elphias was here when Fra Angelico painted our frescoes.”

Brother Elphias, job accomplished, has sunk back into a bent and feeble looking posture, but his face brightens at the mention of the frescoes. “Fra Giovanni was such a pious man. I used to skip supper to watch him paint. I watched him so carefully, and yet it was always a mystery how that unearthly beauty emerged. I’d look away a moment and turn back to see he had painted grace.” 

***

When he's excused from dinner, Sirius steals upstairs to stand in front of  _ The Annunciation _ . Grace, Brother Elphias had said, and Sirius isn’t sure what that means, couldn't put it into words, but he thinks that Brother Elphias is right. 

“Do you like it?” A voice whispers next to him, and Sirius startles, turning to see the man with the curls--  _ Remus _ \-- and Sirius was right, his hair is a rich brown ochre, the wispy ends of which are brightened to golden wheat brown, and Sirius, still hovering at the edges of the painting, can’t help but think of a halo. 

Sirius turns to look closely at Remus in the last of the summer evening light, this man that some brothers call a boy and others a demon, and Sirius sees his thin lips, poised to smile. “Yes, it’s…” but Sirius trails off, taking in his distinctive nose, his thin cheeks and their soft hollows, the lines of his throat, baring an adam's apple, all of him arched and sunken as if to provide the most alluring shadows, the most interesting contours. 

Remus shifts, eyes flicking down and away and Sirius tears himself away from the sweep of dark eyelashes and realizes he hasn't spoken. "I like their hands, the way they’re holding their hands like they're carrying something."

Remus gives Sirius a careful sort of smile. "It's always looked protective to me."

Sirius looks back at the painting, at the angel Gabriel and Mother Mary, holding their arms close to themselves, Mary's poised over her soft middle and feels Remus' words mix with his own, like what they're holding, what they're carrying is protection, safety, a space held in their arms for those things. 

“Yes. Sort of… drawn in.” Sirius doesn’t know exactly what he means, but the man’s smile widens. 

“Is it true that you’re a painter?” Remus asks him softly.

“I was almost a painter," Sirius says, trying to sound light-hearted, "Now I'm just a postulate." 

Remus doesn't have a chance to answer before Brother Severus sweeps around the corner, seething. "Should have known I'd catch you with the scullion."

“Why aren’t you in the kitchen?” Severus barks at Remus.

“I’ve finished. Brother Amos requested my assistance in the garden,” he says deferentially.

“You’d best be on your way then, Lupin.” 

Severus says Lupin with some special disdain and the man blushes, brushing by and quickly descending the stairs.

By God's teeth Sirius  _ despises _ Severus.


	3. chapter three

The repetitive prayers grate on Sirius but it's the pervasive quiet that makes him feel like he'll crack under the weight of the same confessions uttered every mass and drives him to sneak a lump of charcoal from the brick oven.

It’s not as good as the charcoal he had before and he misses his chalks and drawing tablet but it works. He wakes up on time for Lauds in the blue dark before dawn and sits in his cell sketching with little chips of charcoal. 

He gets away with it because many of the monks spend their solitary prayer hours copying texts; the sound of his scratching is just one among many. Sirius hears more than he used to. In the quiet of the monastery, with speaking so prohibited, he grasps on to the small sounds of pages turned, bare feet shuffling on stone, a cough from down the corridor. 

He doesn't have a model to sketch so he uses himself, one hand drawing the other. His hands have changed. The blisters have given way to callouses and the tips of Sirius' fingers are different. A little wider, a little rounder, almost imperceptible but not to Sirius, who spends all his time now listening and looking. 

He moves on from the contours of his fingers to the knuckles, the ever so slim lines of shadow needed to round them. He could never explain-- his mother never wanted to hear-- what happens when Sirius sketches a body. Temptations of the flesh, she would say, idolatry, covetous. 

Sirius sits up, straightening his back and rolling his neck. His brother said to dwell on the body was to forget to dwell on the spirit. That these new paintings, so modeled, so real, weren't as heavenly. He bends down again, to the faint swells of the veins under his skin. 

They're wrong. To study the body is to know what it means to be made in God's image. In his own way, Sirius knows. 

He knows himself too, he knows he's not always looking for God in the body of a man. He doesn't care. He can't. He can't help thinking of Remus, how lovely he would be to draw, his deep set eyes, always shadowed. 

Sirius hears the clack of sandals at the end of the corridor. He carefully wipes the charcoal smudges from his skin and shuffles his papers, his copied Aquinas on top. 

***

In the last few weeks Sirius has learned who his allies are. Brother Cornelius will always snitch. Brother Fabian gives him paternal winks, always ready to top off his cup of wine at supper. Brother Elphias doesn't let any infraction slip but he assigns Sirius' penance himself and it's always copying out St. Thomas Aquinas. Brother Amos will let Sirius rest (hide) in the herb garden if he works for a little while. 

Whenever he can he comes to the herb garden. Brother Severus rarely passes through this part of the monastery; Severus looks more suited to digging the monastery crypt than basking in sunshine.

Sirius crouches in the shade underneath a tenacious and sprawling rosemary bush. Brother Amos sits on a bench nearby, pestling poppy stalks for plasters. Bees buzz above Sirius' head, visiting the tiny purple rosemary flowers. Peter, a round cheeked lay brother huffs and puffs pulling weeds. As much as he hates it here, the garden's bustling warmth is peaceful. 

"So how did you end up here?" 

"I'm the third son. What else was I supposed to do," Peter says. 

"Why not join a guild?"

Peter shrugs. "It's not so bad here. Brother Marvolo still lets us have cinghiale on Feast Days."

Sirius sighs. Peter laughs at Sirius' bawdier jokes and he hasn't snitched on him yet, but he's a bit simple. The only people with ambition here are drunk on the wrong sort. Maybe a few came to San Marco through sincere religious sentiment, but Sirius suspects most are like Peter, second or third sons seeking the comfort of guaranteed meals, drawn by the promise of power, sent here by families to garner the attention of the papacy. 

Sirius wonders if anyone else was sent here as a result of the fury whipped up by Brother Marvolo. Sirius’ mother, already old-fashioned and blood obsessed, thinking herself above self-made merchants and desperate to guard the Black duchy with an heir, had lept at Marvolo's condemnations. Everything Sirius wanted in life was deemed an indulgence.

It was different only a decade ago. Sirius was still a child but he remembers the men who read Aristotle and Plato, Cicero, Virgil, and Homer; how artists like Ghiberti and Massacio were celebrated and revered for their lifelike renderings. 

He remembers too, men who read Catallus and Ovid, the paintings of Apollo and Hyacinth, Zeus and Ganymede proudly displayed, that there were certain acceptable ways to pursue such desires. His Uncle Alphard brought him once to call on the Medici Palace, to visit the young man his uncle  _ tutored _ . 

He saw a statue of David there, slender and effeminate, the feather of Goliath's helmet caressing his thigh, displayed prominently, shamelessly, in the middle of the courtyard. 

He wonders how Remus came to San Marco. Brother Elphias said he'd known Remus his whole life. The few times Sirius has seen him since the afternoon milling his head is bent, gaze on his feet. He certainly looks the part of a humble servant of the Lord, which might explain why he's not in favor with Riddle and his ilk, more concerned with power and prophecy. 

"Do you know Remus?" Sirius asks, sitting up abruptly, rosemary branches brushing his hair. 

Peter glances at Brother Amos before answering. "I would but he keeps to himself."

"No one talks to him?"

"That's not it, exactly," Peter says. But he never says what exactly it is.

***

One morning Severus comes to collect him, seething and baring his teeth he orders Sirius to follow. Sirius thinks he's been discovered hiding out in the herb garden but Severus takes him down to the scriptorium and stops just outside the door. “You're to assist Brother Fabian,” he says. He barks inside, “Watch him,” and strides out into the courtyard, robes billowing behind him. 

“Come in, come in,” Brother Fabian says distractedly, one finger poised under the line of text he's copying, hunched over his work. 

Sirius looks around the dim, windowless room, the only light coming from the doorway. There are low work benches and shelves stacked with bowls for mixing ink, bits of iron gall, rock and ochre wrapped haphazardly in wax cloth, mortars and pestles, wax and signet stamps, scattered quills, stacks of paper and even a few sheets of vellum teetering precariously on a high shelf. There's a doorway in the far corner of the room that Sirius can’t quite see through from this angle. 

Brother Fabian painstakingly finishes a line, carefully marking his place before looking up at Sirius. 

"Finally, no? Imagine having Ghirlandaio's apprentice scrub the floors! What a waste!" 

Sirius already liked Brother Fabian but now all the more knowing he's impressed by Sirius' apprenticeship. "Brother Severus doesn't look happy about it." Sirius says cheerfully.

Brother Fabian laughs, "Ha! No! And poor Brother Marvolo." Brother Fabian leans forward, for all his years still looking like a mischievous boy. "They forget our dear Abbot Albus." He chuckles again and then says slyly, "Someone must have written a letter."

Sirius grins. "Brother Fabian I'm one favor away from swearing fealty to you." 

"Illuminate these manuscripts and I'll consider your debt paid." 

  
  


Being in the scriptorium feels like leaving the monastery all together. Brother Fabian has a long list of commissioned books to transcribe for wealthy Florentine families and Sirius helps him by fetching more ink and paper, sometimes manuscripts from the library. When he's done transcribing, Sirius illuminates them. 

Brother Fabian is easily distracted and jovial, often forgetting a line here and there or copying a whole passage out of order but Sirius doesn't mind because he gets to paint in little corrections: a meandering border, a little man tugging an errant passage into place with rope. He paints flowers, peacocks, demons, family crests, angels trumpeting-- anything. 

No one looks over his shoulder.

Brother Fabian continues to surprise him, asking Sirius one day to bring him a book with a leather cover, stamped in the corner with an orange tree. It's  _ The Decameron _ , a book Sirius' mother had prohibited after Brother Marvolo deemed it obscene.

"How do you have this?" Sirius asks him. 

Brother Fabian looks up at him from his writing desk, a twinkle in his eye. "I've no doubt I can trust you not to blab about it." 

A copy of  _ The Decameron _ \-- Sirius has read bits and pieces, heard stories, he knows enough to know it's full of corrupt clergy and bawdy love affairs, and here it is, in San Marco, right under Prior Marvolo's damning eye. 

"You might like this one," Brother Fabian says, flipping to a section.

"Did someone commission a passage?" Sirius asks.

Brother Fabian just smiles benignly and starts humming, bustling over his work table readying paper, quill, and ink for transcribing. 

Sirius settles down at his work table as well, wondering about Brother Fabian and who he knows outside this monastery, for someone is surely helping him sneak in prohibited texts. He pulls out the Mirandola manuscript he's illuminating for a Strozzi cousin's coming of age and soon his speculating is lost to the sweep of inks curving around ornate letters. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a lot of the details about manuscripts in this chapter came from post--grad's generous help. https://post--grad.tumblr.com/ check it out if you like medieval medicine and cute dogs (that's everyone, right?)


	4. chapter four

The Petrucci family has commissioned  _ The Canticle of the Sun _ for Rodolphus, a brute of a man Sirius has always despised. Hidden amongst the floral garlands and colorful birds, Sirius illustrates cats licking themselves and dogs shitting. He doubts Rodolphus will ever open the small prayer book; no amount of St. Francis' intercession could save that man. 

Even as Sirius eases into the comfort of sketching and painting again, the quiet buzzing productivity of the herb garden, laughing with Peter, generous alms with Brother Fabian at supper, life at the Monastery remains tense. 

Brother Marvolo treats them to daily hellfire homilies at mass, spitting and hissing the word of God. Sirius watches the brothers' faces, trying to discern who among them has donned the hair shirts, who among them lusts for the power implicitly promised by Marvolo's prophetic dreams, who squirms and who stiffens and who bows their heads at the calls for cleansing Florence. 

Everywhere in San Marco there is whispering, two or three men huddled, casting sideways glances and glares, heads bent; everywhere a feeling of danger if overheard, a feeling of being watched. Sirius watches these machinations with derision-- these small men with designs beyond their ability, beyond their worth. 

Sirius has to release the tension somehow and being mischievous in Rodolphus' prayer book is particularly satisfying. Men like Marvolo, using morality as a stepping stone to power disgust him, but men like Rodolphus, with their popularly approved displays of goodness, their beautiful prayer books, the quiet performance of genuflecting for an audience-- Sirius knows them to be the most insidious. 

He hears footsteps from down the hall and carefully drags a piece of paper over the cat he just painted with its leg in the air, tongue out. Rodolphus will never see it, but Brother Severus might. 

It's not Brother Severus though. 

Remus quietly emerges from the doorway, carrying a sack over each shoulder. The wide cuffs of his robes have fallen down to his elbows and the lines of his forearms are taut holding on to the sacks.

"Ah, Remus, it's been an age. I haven't seen you much in the library."

Remus sets the bundles down on the nearest work bench, untying them. "I come in the morning sometimes."

"Good, good," Brother Fabian says. "Do you see I have an assistant now? Ghirlandaio's apprentice," he says like a proud father.

Sirius tries to look like he hasn't been staring at Remus since he walked in. 

Remus nods to him briefly before focusing once more on his task. "Where would you like the new quills Brother Fabian?"

Brother Fabian bustles around, moving stacks of this to make room for stacks of that, shifting materials around in a system not even he understands to clear a bit of space for the new supplies Remus has brought. Sirius makes himself busy too, painting stripes on the cat and stealing glances at Remus. 

The more Brother Fabian bustles about discovering things he's lost and losing new things the more Remus' smile grows, his posture relaxes. Sirius sees a keen and observant gaze no longer trained on the floor. 

There's a moment when Sirius thinks Remus has seen the cat, unsure if he imagined the quietest huff of laughter, pretending as he is to be so absorbed in his work. Neither of them speak to each other, but it's no matter. Sirius knows how to find him now.

***

Sirius tells Brother Elphias that he would like to make his own translation of Aquinas, to their modern Florentine, much to Brother Elphias' approval. He's now allowed to leave his cell in the mornings to work on his translation in the scriptorium. 

The mornings he spends in the scriptorium without Brother Fabian are the first times he's felt truly alone since he arrived. Even in his cell at night he can hear the coughs and snores of the other monks through his always open door. For the first few days he just sits, doing and thinking nothing-- he hadn't realized the heavy weight of constant supervision. 

Then, he thinks of Remus. It's a futile preoccupation but one that Sirius allows himself in this bleak, utilitarian hive. Fanciful, to imagine he might know Remus, that Remus might know him, an indulgent daydream to think of speaking to the scullion who shares a reverence for that intangible something held carefully in the arms of Fra Angelico's angels.

A week passes with nothing but half-hearted transcribing before Remus comes. 

He comes in not through the scriptorium, but the front entrance of the library, and Sirius doesn't know how long he's been there when he finally hears the turn of a page. Peering into the library from the scriptorium door, he sees Remus sitting in a row near the middle. His temple is smeared with flour and Sirius can perfectly imagine him standing in front of the searing heat of the brick oven, paddling loaves in, raising a floured wrist to push the curls from his sweaty forehead.

"Did you need this?" Remus asks, holding up the book he's reading. 

"Ah, no."

Sirius sits down next to Remus and lifts the neighboring book. "I need this one."

He doesn't look at the cover, nor does he read the page he's flipped to, instead surreptitiously trying to read the page open in front of Remus. A man is inside a barrel, his wife bent over the top, her lover lifting her skirts. He isn't sure what he expected but it wasn't this. Sirius peeks at Remus face, only to see he's looking at Sirius with a knowing smile. 

"Are you sure you weren't looking for this one?" Remus asks again, but this time it's not a deferential inquiry-- he's teasing Sirius. 

"Is that-- are you reading  _ The Decameron _ during morning  _ prayer _ ?" Sirius asks, awed.

"It's very important to have examples of how not to live," Remus says seriously.

"Ah, so are you learning not to sleep with other mens' wives?"

"Well Giannello gets away with it. What I've learned is not to climb into barrels."

Sirius laughs heartily, possibly for the first time at San Marco. "My mother never let us have a copy, but I've heard a few stories at the taverns."

"Here then, you need it more than I do." 

Remus moves to slide the book over to Sirius' lap and Sirius moves closer on the bench, their thighs almost touching. This close Sirius can smell flour and wood smoke on him.

"But-- it's meant to be read aloud isn't it?" 

Remus regards Sirius for a moment. "I suppose it is. Did you want to?"

"No, no, you should. I'm terrible at reading aloud."

"I doubt you could be worse than the scullion."

"No it's true. All my tutors deplored me for drawing pictures instead of letters. You should read it." 

"If you insist," Remus says, flipping to a new section. "I think you'll like this one." 

The book stays open on both their laps and Sirius doesn't move away. He sinks into the slightly raspy sound of Remus reading, stilted with nerves at first, before gaining confidence and changing between subtle inflections for different characters. Remus reads to him about nuns at an abbey, all taking turns with the gardner in the shed. His voice stays soft, nothing like the dramatically acted passages at the taverns, and the softness of it draws Sirius in, he has to listen closely, attentively to catch everything. 

Remus reads to him about clergymen and their mistresses and lovers separated and reunited and the bells signalling the beginning of Prime and the end of Prime come and go, the room grows brighter, Remus' dark hair transforms in the morning light, burnishing with the rise of the sun and Sirius is so mesmerized by the gentle cadence, the slow brightening, that he doesn't hear the bells for the first meal, coming back to himself only when Remus moves to shut the book. 

"I have to go," he says and Sirius can only nod.


	5. chapter five

Remus comes to the library intermittently, as unpredictable as any holy visitation, leaving Sirius to wait in uncertain anticipation. When he doesn't come, Sirius tries to manage his disappointment with distraction, mostly copying out St. Thomas Aquinas. 

When he does come, he reads to Sirius. Sirius catalogs everything he can about Remus-- the prominent Adam's apple on his thin, long neck, the wisps of curls just behind his ears, his long skinny fingers, each knuckle prominent, sometimes, a little bit of dough in the crease of a fingernail. Sirius listens attentively, but sometimes the meaning of the words gets buried beneath the sound of Remus' raspy voice and the sweet smell of flour, the fine dustings disappearing against the white of his robes, sometimes a smudge on his forearm or cheek. 

Sirius can almost feel the powder beneath his fingers-- it would feel like the charcoal on his own. 

One day, Remus asks about the charcoal dust on the pads of Sirius' fingers.

"I stole some from the bread oven," he admits.

"You don't have to steal it," Remus tells him.

The next time, Sirius brings a few of his studies with him, a few smudged renderings of his left hand and one of his feet. Remus looks at them a long time, saying nothing, but later that day Sirius finds a few small lumps of charcoal on his worktable. The gesture carries Sirius through the rest of his day; buoying him even through Brother Marvolo's midday homily.

Remus asks Sirius about drawing, about art and his apprenticeship and Sirius tells him it's true that his tutors hated him, he was always drawing the desk or the chair or the join of the walls at the ceiling to practice perspective. He tells him about Ghirlandaio, gruff and exacting, the best years of his life. And before he knows it, he's telling Remus about  _ David _ .

"When I was younger my uncle took me to the Medici Palace. They have a bronze David by Donatello. It was like nothing I had ever seen. He's-- David, I mean-- he's posing like... " Sirius pauses, not knowing how to tell Remus how sensual, how alluring it was, how he looked and looked and looked. "You have to walk all the way around it, you have to see it from every side, every side is… beautiful." 

Sirius doesn't know when he started whispering, when he started to lean closer to Remus. He's giving himself away. He looks up from his own hands to Remus' face. This close he can see that Remus has very faint freckles, just the tiniest extra dab of ochre brushed featherlight across his nose and cheeks. Sirius stares, looking with all the intensity thirteen year old Sirius gave  _ David, _ only this time his senses are finely tuned to things  _ David _ could not offer: Remus' soft scent and warmth, his capacity to  _ look back _ .

One of his drawings slips off his lap and the soft shuffling sound of the paper draws them both back. Remus reaches down for the paper. He turns it over to the blank side and says, "Will you draw it? I want to see."

"I don't have any charcoal with me."

Remus says warmly, "I didn't mean right now." 

Sirius stays up all night. The next morning he creeps down to the library with the drawing tucked in his robes, carefully tri-folded so that David is not creased, rendered in ink borrowed from the scriptorium so he doesn't smudge. 

He sketched David from three different angles. From the front, so that Remus could see the fall of curls over thin shoulders and the thrilling audacity of his stylish hat. From the side, for the jut of a sharp knee and the softly rounded abdomen. From the back, for the smoothly shifting line of spine curving from shoulder blade to waist, for the viscerally felt feather that sweeps up the inside of a slender thigh, just brushing the plump curve of asscheek. 

Sirius watches as Remus carefully unfolds it. Remus' face stays blank but he says, "Can I keep this?"

And Sirius says, "Of course, it's for you," hoping simultaneously that Remus doesn't read into the gesture and that he does, that he understands something Sirius cannot say out loud. 

***

Sirius is in the library, returning a stack of manuscripts to their rightful places. He can't walk by the row with  _ The Decameron _ without thinking of Remus, he can't even walk into the library without thinking of Remus. Like the ever present ringing of bells across Florence, every part of the monastery now chimes with Remus. 

It's absurd. After  _ David, _ some association was formed between the subtle but radiating power of a pebble poured into every curve of  _ David _ and Remus' slender corded arms, the graceful motion of his milling and the soft sound of his voice. What was once a curiosity about Remus' rejection from the other monks and an aesthetic appreciation of his suitability as model for St. Sebastian, has quickly and irrevocably become something else. 

Something Sirius feels in his chest and his throat, something Sirius berates himself for, because even if Remus had the same inclinations as him... He wishes he could waste less time imagining the impossible. He wishes he could accept and take comfort in a man's friendship without wanting more. 

His moody thoughts are interrupted by a boisterous greeting from the scriptorium that Sirius recognizes as Brother Fabian's familial brother Gideon. Gideon visits often-- San Marco is supposedly on the route from his home to the wool guild-- bringing news and contraband sweets for his brother.

He gets up to say hello but at the doorway sees that Gideon and Brother Fabian are speaking furtively. 

"-- think he's positioning himself for the papacy," Gideon says, voice low and urgent.

Brother Fabian shakes his head, "Even he's not that delusional--"

"No, listen brother, we've had news-- Malfoy's father and grandfather supported the Avignon Papacy, poured gold into it. Abbot Albus thinks he's trying to start a war."

"He'll need more than the Malfoys."

"Brother," Gideon says gravely, "he has more than the Malfoys."

"Have you seen Albus?" 

"Only letters. Euphemia--" 

Sirius stops listening, sick at the thought that his own family, the money pouring into the monastery to keep him there, is funding Brother Marvolo, because that must be the  _ he _ they're whispering about. Sirius knew the dour and paranoid mood around Florence was bad, but if Brother Marvolo is positioning himself for the papacy, things are much worse than he thought. 

He sits down on the bench by  _ The Decameron _ and feels disgusted with himself, enjoying Remus' company, reading about bawdy nuns while a maniac is trying to take over. He should be-- he doesn't know what he should be doing.

  
  


Later in the garden Sirius asks Peter about what he overheard. To Sirius' surprise Peter laughs.

"Don't take all the gossip seriously. Last year all anyone could talk about was Brother Cornelius making a move for the Abbacy and nothing ever came of it."

"But Brother Marvolo has substantial financial backing," Sirius argues, suffused with shame.

"It's all talk. The brothers just need something to do when they run out of mending."

Sirius mulls this over in the little bit of shade provided by the rosemary bush at midday. He can't let go of the urgency of Gideon's voice, Brother Fabian's shock, the large sums Sirius  _ knows  _ are collected by Brother Marvolo. The sun beats down, doubling his irritation. 

"By God's teeth it's hot," Sirius snaps.

"Figs are already ripening," Peter says cheerfully. "Won't be much longer."

"It's torture, these heavy robes. I wouldn't be surprised if Marvolo does it on purpose. I bet the monks at Santa Maria Novella have summer robes instead of these woolen blankets."

Peter plucks at his robe, "If only you were a lay brother, you'd wear white."

"Peter, I cannot tell you how deeply I wish I was, if not escaped from this monastery all together, a lay brother."

"Least you get your own cell," Peter says. 

"Do you all share then?" Sirius asks, having never thought about where the lay brothers eat and sleep. 

"Four to a cell."

"Does Remus sleep there too?"

"He has his own by the kitchen."

"Why's that?"

"Who cares? It's unfair. He's not even a lay brother and he gets his own room. I bet it stays warm in winter too, right next to the kitchen like that."

"Shouldn't be too hard to stay warm with three other men in your room." 

Peter makes a face. 

"Frigging must be hard though."

Peter grins, "Where there's a will there's a way."


	6. chapter six

It finally happens that Sirius is tasked with illuminating a manuscript for someone he knows, his own cousin in fact, the only one he likes. Although according to Sirius' mother, Andromeda was no longer a relation when she refused the carefully crafted political marriage to a brutish man from Lucca and instead married "that crass garment dyer." 

Truthfully he was a merchant-- not it would make much difference to his mother-- whose work importing dyes and pigments meant he frequented the slums where the garment dyers lived. Quite a wealthy merchant, Sirius would guess, based on the lavishly decorated Book of Hours he commissioned for his wife.

Sirius was told to fill every page with color, and he is. He's spent all week painting a scene of Mary Magdalene discovering Christ's empty tomb. Today he's painting an elaborate garland of violets and Florentine lilies, twining and blooming around puti and tondos featuring crowned skulls. There are birds and dogs and evergreen wreaths, golden fountains and gold leafed frames. 

Bent low over his work, he doesn't notice Remus until he speaks. "It's very good," Remus says. 

Sirius jumps and Brother Fabian chuckles, losing his place transcribing and then muttering curses. 

Remus glances between Brother Fabian and Sirius, biting his lip like he has something to say.

"What is it?"

"It's just… you're very talented, you really could have been a painter. How did you end up here?"

Sirius looks over at Brother Fabian, still searching with his finger for where he left off. Does Brother Fabian know? "My mother found some practice drawings… on a subject she found unsuitable," Sirius says carefully omitting the sodomy; his mother found a great many things unsuitable, it could have just as easily been a pagan god. "And Marvolo's got her eating out of his hand, she packed me up here to save my soul and get rid of me." 

Remus' brow is furrowed. 

"Look, it's fine. I… Well I didn't want to be a monk but at least I can work in the scriptorium," Sirius says, trying to sound light and failing. 

"No, it's not that… it's--" Remus breaks off, looking at Brother Fabian, who has stopped his search to observe their conversation.

"What?"

Remus looks at Brother Fabian again, who leans back in his chair to check the hallway and then nods at Remus. "It's just… you've got it backwards. Your mother, the Malfoys, the Petrucci, they've got Brother Marvolo eating out of their hands."

"I… what do you mean?"

Remus clasps his hands together tightly, the same as when he's deferentially walking through the corridors. "They wanted the Medici exiled… You want to exile the wealthiest family in Florence? You pay the prior to preach against wealth and everything it can buy."

"You mean--?" Sirius can't grasp onto one thought amidst all the realizations-- his family are not victims of the prevailing politics, they're  _ driving _ them, and not through any Godly sentiment, they just want power-- they want power for their own  _ wealth _ , the very thing they're preaching against. Brother Marvolo is being  _ paid _ to preach against earthly possessions, the hypocrisy at every turn astounds Sirius. "God in heaven."

Remus nods solemnly. "I'm sorry."

He turns to Brother Fabian, "You knew?"

Brother Fabian nods, pity evident. 

"Does anyone..? Does Brother Marvolo believe  _ any _ of this?"

"It's hard to tell. San Marco was different when I was younger, Brother Marvolo was always a little intense, but not like this. Sometimes it seems like he really does believe it."

"Some of the other brothers have gotten caught up in it. Brother Cornelius, that paragon of virtue, truly believes  _ The Decameron _ will corrupt people. He's become so irritatingly fervent," Brother Fabian says.

"They want to be good."

Sirius scoffs. "No, they want to be right."

"That too," Remus says. "And there's good reason to think they are. Christ lived in poverty, He was so angry at the moneylenders in the temple He turned over their table. It's hard to argue against."

"But! They're-- they're! It's too much! They've gone too far!"

"I know. Sirius, I  _ know _ . I'm just saying it's easy to get caught up in this, it seems so well reasoned, and when there's a little less reason and a little less reason…" Remus trails off with a shrug. 

"It's sick. It's despicable, pretending to be more pure to punish people." 

"I know, Sirius," he says quietly, stepping a little closer to Sirius. "There's no room for joy, for nuance or knowledge, or doubt. It's terrible, what they're taking away from us, all in the name of God." 

Hearing Remus summarize it so completely, Sirius deflates. He feels exhausted all of sudden, the impossibility of fighting against people who either don't care if they're right or are certain they're right, using their money or their certainty to justify their increasingly restrictive judgements. It feels insurmountable. It feels like trying to reason with a wild boar.

"This is hopeless." 

"No, no it's not hopeless," Remus says softly.

"He's right," Brother Fabian says. "There's a great deal to be done."

Sirius sighs. "How did you escape Brother Cornelius' fate?"

"You mean why didn't I fall for Marvolo? Brother Elphias was my tutor."

"What's he have to say about this?"

Brother Fabian and Remus smile and answer together as if chanting in mass, "Never deny, seldom affirm, always distinguish."

"What does that mean?" 

"Ask him at supper tonight. And brush up on your St. Thomas Aquinas or he'll know you're here sketching every morning," Brother Fabian says.

***

Try as he might, Sirius cannot share Brother Fabian and Remus' good faith. His mind feels wrapped in bindings he can't tear loose. He's so disgusted with Marvolo, with his mother, the Malfoys, Cornelius, all the people in Florence who have swallowed every sermon and regurgitated it for their own selfish gain. 

He sits in the library all day, surrounded by volumes that teach reason, argument, compassion, faith, governing; tomes filled with wit and quick, resourceful characters, cheerful absurdity, all left here to rot. He thinks of the drawings his mother discovered, torn and scattered. Drawings full of awe and wonder, and yes, sin. Sodomy. Prohibited. 

He's still slumped against the wall when Remus finds him. 

"What's happened to you?" Remus asks. "Brother Severus is looking for you. Why weren't you at the chapter meeting?"

Sirius shrugs.

"Well it doesn't matter. Come on, I heard him say he'd give you latrines for the next month." 

"Where are we going?"

Remus shushes him. They go down the corridor toward the kitchen and right through it, passing by the searing heat of the brick oven and large table, to an outside door. Remus unlocks it and ushers him out into the street. The white stone wall the encloses San Marco stretches high above them.

"Tell him Brother Amos asked you to help with the preparations for the Malfoy baptism," he says as they round the corner. Remus unlocks another door and pushes him into the garden. Sirius can hear Remus locking it from the other side. 

Brother Amos is waiting for him. "You have a good friend."

  
  


They're tending to the bee hives, carefully removing the frames filled with honeycomb, when Severus finds him.

"You're really in the shit now, I'll make sure of it, elbow deep for as long as you're here," Severus says, vicious pleasure etched across his face.

"My apologies Brother Severus, I haven't nearly enough time to prepare everything for the Malfoy baptism on my own. I requested Sirius assist me. I must have forgotten to tell you in all the commotion. Such an auspicious occasion," Brother Amos says, making sure Brother Severus knows he's not sorry in the least.

Sirius smiles brightly at Severus, watching his eyes bulge in rage. Severus demands Sirius come with him, but Brother Amos suggests that a lack of preparation for the baptism will surely be a discourtesy not taken lightly. Severus storms out of the garden, nearly trampling Brother Amos' delicate basil plants. 

Sirius is still grinning triumphantly when Brother Amos puts down the honey comb frame and fixes Sirius with a scolding look he knows well from the faces of his tutors. 

"You listen, I know you're used to gallivanting about, no consequences--" Sirius opens his mouth to protest, "--no, I'm saying it once and you'll listen well. I won't suffer you dragging Remus down with your carelessness. When you're thrown out you'll find some rich aunt or cousin to take you in, Remus has no where else to go. You think about that before you get him involved in any more of these schemes. It's too dangerous right now."

None of the many scoldings Sirius endured from his many tutors has ever silenced him like Brother Amos has now.

Sirius feels miserable. He's ashamed he didn't realize the greater danger Remus risks. He can't stop thinking about Remus cornered by Marvolo's men, forced to confess to their contrived charges and subjected to humiliation. Because they can. 

"No more of that," Brother Amos says as if he knows Sirius' thoughts. "We've got work to do." 


	7. chapter seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which bbd completely overdoes it with the References. god almighty.

The guilt of endangering Remus sits heavy in Sirius' stomach. He doesn't leave his cell in the mornings and feels miserable. But Sirius has always gotten himself into trouble, not always knowingly, and Remus would make a very convenient example for the new regime. Sirius can't let that happen. 

Sirius has heard there are now bands of young men who prowl the streets of Florence, searching out indecent dress and behavior. Brother Marvolo praised their dedication and purity and christened them the Frateschi, his little band of roving "monkish" militants. It's not just youths on the street either, the Frateschi are pushing their agenda through the council, urging laws against adultery, public indecency, and of course, sodomy. Marvolo preaches daily on the prophetic visions he's had which promise that purifying Florence of vice will make them richer and more glorious than ever. 

If Brother Fabian notices Sirius' mood he doesn't say anything, but he does make sure Sirius attends mass, meals and the chapter meetings, not letting Sirius sulk alone. All week Fabian has felt like a shadow, hovering silently by Sirius. 

He finally slipped away after supper tonight, excusing himself from the additional choir practice in preparation for the Malfoy baptism by pleading a stomachache. 

The sun has disappeared behind San Marco's tall outer wall and the garden seems very still in the twilight. The bees are done for the day but Sirius can hear the echoes of the brother's chanting. He leans his head against the white stone still warm from the day and closes his eyes. Far away like this, the steady songs are comforting. 

He hears the shuffle of sandals along the stone path and peers over the rosemary bush-- it's Remus. Sirius doesn't know what to do and before he can decide Remus is standing over him, shoulders curved in and arms crossed over a book on his chest, his beautifully hollowed face. Sometimes everything about Remus seems concave, draw in so tightly he looks like he's been hammered into shape. 

Sirius looks up at him and Remus looks back, silently, before he asks, "Are you angry with me?"

Sirius scrambles to stand up-- "No! Oh Christ, No"-- but Remus puts a hand on his shoulder and sits down next to him. At the look of relief on Remus' face Sirius adds quietly, "I was… guilty. Brother Amos says I'm going to get you into trouble."

Remus scoffs. "Brother Amos doesn't like that _I'm_ going to get _myself_ into trouble. Sometimes the brothers forget I'm not a child-- their child." 

Sirius doesn't know what to say to that. "What do you have?" Sirius asks, nodding to the book.

Remus lets his still-crossed arms unfold onto his lap, revealing _The Divine Comedy_. "I've been reading the _Inferno_ again."

"If there were ever an incentive not to get into trouble…" 

Remus laughs. "Should I read some?"

"Go ahead. Maybe Dante's beloved Beatrice will take pity on us too."

Remus finds the section he's looking for with an ease that suggests he's searched through this book often.

Sirius leans a little closer than is really necessary to see what passage it is. Canto V. “Oh,” Sirius says, straightening up and giving Remus space, instinctively feeling that he ought not to push a man who’s reading about the eternal torments awaiting those who succumb to lust. 

But Remus just smooths his hands over the pages and presses his shoulder against Sirius'. He reads to Sirius about Minos and his grotesque tail, and _a place where no light shone at all, bellowing like the sea racked by a tempest_ , where the spirits are eternally buffeted by winds. 

Remus reads the meter beautifully and Sirius finds himself breathing in time. The sweeping winds and Sirius' staccato breaths, the growing shadows in the garden, the warm press of Remus' shoulder against his own. Usually lulled by the soft of rasp of Remus' voice, Sirius feels the same sharpened awareness he's only ever accessed by sketching.

When Remus comes to the part about Paolo and Francesca, he leans his shoulder more heavily into Sirius and his voice becomes strained, the steady drive of the tempest seems to lull as Remus whispers _then kissed my mouth, and trembled as he did, Our Galehot was that book and he who wrote it._

He's looking at Sirius as he recites the last lines; the pilgrim, overcome with pity, faints. 

In the silence that follows Sirius tries to get his breath back. The finely tuned awareness Remus held together with his voice dissembles into fragments of thoughts Sirius can't put together. He thinks this means something, but whatever meaning is there lies muffled under layers of _no_ and _can't_ and _don't_.

Remus stretches a trembling hand out to Sirius' clenched fists and rests it lightly atop. 

"Do you think the wind is warm?"

"What?"

"The winds. It's colder deeper in Hell. Do you think the winds in the second circle are warm?"

Sirius is bewildered. He unclenches his hand and watches Remus shakily slip his fingers between Sirius' own. Everything is confusing. All Sirius can say is, "I don't know."

“Warm wind blowing on your skin.” Remus removes his hand and carefully shuts the book. “Like a breath.”

"I-- Yes?" Sirius says.

"That doesn't sound terrible," Remus says, looking down at his hands resting on top of the book. Sirius looks at them too, he wants them back.

"But you could never act on it."

"No." Remus sighs. "No, you never could. But… but it would be there. You could feel it. Like your _David_ , Pygmalion but your statue never comes alive. But it's still yours to… to look at."

Sirius thinks he understands now. "Neither a painter nor a lover," he says. "Just a watcher and a listener, a damned contemplating monk."

Sirius finds suddenly that he can no longer dredge up the anger he's relied upon since he came to San Marco, finding instead only a bottomless pit of ripped and torn drawings. In the absence of that bolstering anger, his derision, his righteousness, he feels deeply defeated. 

He looks up and the expression on Remus' face makes Sirius' breath catch-- a look of understanding far beyond words. "They've taken away…" Sirius falters.

Remus slowly reaches out his hand again and this time rests it lightly on Sirius' chest. Sirius can't take his eyes off his hands. "I know," Remus says soothingly, "I know, I know."

"Everything that I…" How can Sirius explain how far, how deep their prohibitions reach. " _David_ \-- that would never be allowed. They'd destroy it. And… and I know it's not… I know that, that it's wrong to--" to _lust_ after King David, to heap his base desires upon a holy man, to lay his wanting at Remus' feet.

He finds his voice again. "I still want it. All of it." _The Decameron_ and _David_ , every work of love and lust, every Galehot. Sirius cannot deny that they're not works of God, they don't praise His holy name. They're corrupting and wrong, but Sirius has felt so wrong his whole life that he needs them. He's willing to risk the temptation to evil for the affirmation. He thinks he's willing to risk a lot more for Remus.

Remus smoothes his hand over Sirius' chest, almost petting him. "Sometimes I imagine…" Remus smiles crookedly. "Sometimes I imagine the Last Supper, and they've all eaten the Body and drank the Blood and Christ knows he's going to die, the disciples know, just like in _The Decameron_ , they're all just waiting for the plague to kill them, and, someone, maybe Peter, starts telling a joke--"

Sirius lets out a sob or a laugh, he's not sure. "It would be Peter, he's used to getting scolded." 

"Yes! And then they're all doing it, Luke is getting drunk, someone does an imitation of the Roman soldiers, Mary Magdalene jokes about being a whore and John can't stop laughing. Christ is quiet for a while, they think He's angry with them and He lets it build up, and then He jokes about dying for them."

"That's so--"

"Blasphemous?"

Sirius smiles, he can feel the warmth of Remus' hand through his robes. "Yes."

"Choir is over," Remus says softly.

With a jolt Sirius realizes the garden is dark, the trees and shrubs reduced to black silhouettes. He doesn't know when the echoes of the monks chanting stopped. "Shit."

Remus stands and pulls Sirius up too. Sirius holds on to his hand for just a moment longer, cataloguing the thrilling tingle of his fingertips tracing Remus' long thin fingers and Remus' soft smile, before he has to rush to his cell.

Laying in his bed, Sirius drifts through the encounter, dreamlike. In his dark cell, his twilight time with Remus in the garden becomes mythological, retold and retold until the different tellings of it are nearly unrecognizable, and Remus at its center, as obscure and contradictory and gorgeous as any Greek god.


	8. chapter eight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god finally. i know 10 k hardly qualifies as a slow burn but i have been d y i n g to post this chapter. here's where we earn that explicit rating :)

Peter is standing on tiptoe on a short stool next to the pomegranate tree, trying to reach the ripe fruit when Sirius finds him. He wobbles on the stool at the sound of Sirius' greeting and Sirius darts forward to steady him.

"Where have you been?" Peter says jovially. "You haven't come around in forever."

"They're keeping me neck deep in manuscripts. No rest for the weary," Sirius says, reaching up to help pick the pomegranates Peter can't reach. 

"Nor the wicked," Peter says, handing Sirius one from his basket.

Sirius laughs. "Where's Brother Amos today? I don't think I've ever seen him leave the garden."

Peter steps down from the stool, gesturing Sirius closer. "Brother Amos said Remus had a fit early this morning."

"What?" Sirius thought Brother Cornelius had been making it up, he didn't think Remus actually-- "What do you mean?"

Peter shrugs. "Just what I said. He has these terrible fits, they say demons possess him."

"That's not true."

"It is so! He thrashes around and his eyes roll back in his head! I've seen it. We all have, it happened once in the middle of Mass."

"Fine but it's not demons."

"How would you know?" Peter asks.

"I-- That's just stupid, demons." 

Peter looks put out, he'd obviously expected Sirius to enjoy the story as a bit of gossip. "Well. Anyway, that's where Brother Amos is."

"What for?"

"I don't know. He brings medicine."

Sirius tries to act normally, as if he doesn't lie awake at night thinking of Remus, but he knows Peter can tell something is wrong. 

"If you're worried about being possessed, don't be. No one else here ever has."

Sirius snaps. "I've got to go," he says. "Good luck with the pomegranates," he adds, a little nastily. 

***

All day Sirius tried to get away from the endless cycle of prayer, work, Mass, meals to see Remus, but after his "stomachache" just a couple nights ago, the brothers were less inclined to believe Sirius was ill again so soon. 

Sirius lies in his small hard bed, listening closely to the sounds of the other monks and waiting for all the shuffling and shifting and coughs to settle. He has no idea what time it is when everything quiets. He leaves his sandals under the bed and creeps down the corridor in his bare feet.

Sirius stops in front of _The Annunciation_ before he goes down the stairs. The colors are muted in the dark and the stone is cold beneath his feet but Sirius needs to see it. Lying in bed waiting, he remembered what Remus said about this painting, about their arms holding open a tender sacred space and Sirius wants to slip into Remus’ arms and ask him what he thinks about everything. 

He steals down the stairs and across the courtyard, to the small corridor on the far side of the dining hall. Past the larder and into the kitchen where, opposite the brick oven still radiating heat, there’s a doorway with a heavy wooden door, much like the one on the larder, the only two doors in San Marco. Sirius thinks of the superstitions the monks have about Remus being possessed and wonders why they think the same door that stops rats would stop demons. 

He knocks before he can question whether this is a good idea and holds his breath, waiting. His palms sweat. If he's caught hair shirts and fasting would be the least of it.

Remus opens the door enough to reveal his short cotton sleep shirt and bare feet and Sirius stands staring at him, hands shaking a little until he balls them into fists. Remus reaches out, his flat hand coming at Sirius and for a wild moment Sirius thinks he’ll shove him, but Remus grabs Sirius’ shirt and hauls him inside, closing the door decisively behind him. 

“You came,” Remus says as if he's unsure. 

“I wanted to see you.” Remus' thin shirt doesn't cover his knees and Sirius can't look away. They're just as bony and hollowed as the rest of him.

“Is that all?” Remus asks. 

Sirius isn't sure of Remus’ mood; he looks uncomfortable, holding his arms stiffly by his side. "I can leave."

Remus steps closer but he's still holding himself rigidly. Sirius could reach out to touch the white cloth of his shirt, hanging loosely and so thin Sirius thinks he can see the outline of the slender body underneath. His fingers are reaching before he realizes but Remus flinches and Sirius withdraws quickly, scrambling away until he's backed up against the door. "I'm sorry," Sirius says, panicking. "I'm sorry, I'll go."

"No. I didn't mean--" He shuffles stiffly toward Sirius, but Sirius can see the grimace he's trying to hide. 

"You don't have to-- I'll go," Sirius says. "I'll go, don't worry."

"No!" 

Sirius is stunned by Remus' vehemence, the first he's ever heard Remus raise his voice. "Just wait, it's only... " He slips his fingers under his collar and gently pulls the cloth over. "It's only that--" He breaks off again and gestures carefully to the hair shirt now exposed. 

Sirius stares. Remus is wearing a hair shirt. He's being punished. Just at the edge of the shirt Remus' skin is red, a wan sickly red and Sirius feels that same red welling up in him. "No. No they can't--" Sirius moves closer, hands reaching out for Remus. "They can't hurt you."

Remus doesn't answer, only watches the slow progress of Sirius' fingers coming up, up, and then, so lightly, the barest brush of those fingertips over his abused skin. 

"Take it off," Sirius demands. "Why didn't you take it off?"

Remus exhales and the outbreath seems to take some of his strength with it, he leans into Sirius' hand on his shoulder. "You should know-- the brothers, they're right about me--" Sirius scoffs. "No, listen, I have fits," Remus says in a rush, "I have fits and, and I shake and thrash and I can't remember it. I don't know why. I promise Sirius, I don't know why. I haven't-- I mean I didn't-- I'm not a--"

"Shhh, no, of course you're not. You're not. I know." He lifts his hands slowly, finally, to Remus' face, smoothing his fingertips over Remus' nose, his cheekbones and, shaking, the corners of Remus' pink mouth. 

Remus is trembling too. "Will you..?" he whispers, tugging on Sirius again. 

He sits down heavily on the bed and Sirius kneels between his legs, fingering the edge of his sleep shirt for a moment before looking up at Remus, seeking approval. Remus smiles down at him and Sirius carefully lifts the sleep shirt up and off. Remus groans when the movement of his arms shifts the hair shirt against his skin. 

Each button slipped through reveals Remus' collarbones, his thin chest, his stomach softly dipping between his ribs and hipbones, all of it rubbed a prickling pink by the hair shirt. Sirius tries to slide it off Remus' shoulders but he stops him. "Come here," Remus says, shifting to lie back on the bed and pulling Sirius over the top of him. 

"Take this off," Remus tells him and Sirius hurriedly pulls his robes over his head, dropping them over the side of the bed, then kneels between Remus' legs again, waiting. 

"Would looking be enough if you could always look like this?" he asks Sirius. 

Sirius nods at first, mesmerized by the expanse of skin on display, he can see the long line of Remus' bicep and the slender swell of his leg muscles disappearing under the line of his shorts. Then, "No," he croaks. "Let me touch you Remus, please." 

Remus laughs and pulls Sirius down on top of him. Sirius groans at the feel of Remus' skin on his, their chests pressed together-- he never thought-- he rubs his cheek against Remus' shoulder-- he never thought he would ever get to feel this, he thinks, pushing his nose into the soft skin of Remus' neck. 

Everywhere Remus' skin is not just warm but hot and his hair smells like flour and smoke, everywhere sweet and burning and Sirius opens his mouth to lick it up. He presses his open mouth against Remus again and again, licking and sucking across his chest almost frantically, his hands smoothing across Remus' skin, everywhere, trying to touch every part of him, and feeling near-crazed with the impossibility of touching all of him at once and the rushing out of all his dammed up desire. He aches with it. 

Sirius wrenches himself onto his hands and knees above Remus, pulling his cock out and tugging at it for only a moment before he pulses into his hand, pulses and tingles so hard he cries out. 

When he opens his eyes Remus is spread out underneath him, cheeks flushed and panting hard. "Mary Mother of God and All the Saints," he swears breathlessly. 

Sirius doesn't think he'll ever catch his breath. Remus reaches up and combs Sirius' hair back from his face, over and over as it falls forward again. "Look at you," Remus says, "My God, look at you. You're so handsome Sirius. Did you know? I've wanted to tell you for ages, since that first day in the library. You looked so handsome. Come here." Remus pulls on Sirius' hair.

"My hand is covered in come-- the laundry." 

"Well." Remus sits up against the wall with a secret kind of smile, then cups his hands underneath his chin and opens his mouth with his pink tongue slipping forward like he's kneeling before a priest for communion. 

Sirius can feel his heartbeat thudding all over his body. 

In the middle of the night in his bed when Sirius allowed himself to want Remus, he never imagined Remus, with his hunched shoulders and his clasped hands, rarely speaking except to voice someone else's words, he never would have thought Remus would look at him the way he is now. 

Sirius shuffles forward on his knees and drags his come covered fingers across Remus' slack lips until Remus tips forward and sucks them into his mouth, tonguing all around them and lapping at Sirius' palm looking so contented, so satisfied that Sirius is hard and aching all over again. 

When he's finished he holds Sirius' hand tenderly in both of his own. "Much better than looking, isn't it?"

Sirius laughs, floundering for words to describe how incredible he feels, whole and delighted. He presses soft kisses to Remus' lips and lets himself be dragged down on top of him. Remus tugs their shorts down and pulls Sirius' hips where he wants them, lines them up just right, and rocks his bare cock into him. "I want you to--" he says, rocking, "Like this."

"The shirt," Sirius says, realizing as he says it that Remus hasn't forgotten he's wearing a hair shirt, how could he. "Are you sure?"

Remus nods, eyes squeezed tight. "Want you to do it. Want it to be from you."

Sirius thrusts into Remus and Remus hisses as his back rubs against the hair shirt. "It's good, it's good," he says before Sirius can start to worry. His raspy voice is hoarse now as he babbles, "Fuck, it's so good. Harder-- ahh! Want to feel you all day, everywhere, in Mass, burning--" words just pouring out like he's been saving them, hoarded and held back just the same as Sirius' desire, both of them spilling over. 

Sirius fucks Remus into the hair shirt until he comes, still spilling words and then holds him up, slips the hair shirt from his pliant body and rolls him over-- he wants to see it-- rubbed just short of raw, the same burning carmine as Mary Magdalene's robes, Remus shivers and shivers while Sirius runs lips and fingers lightly over his abused back and knows his hurting has done more good than his prayers ever have.


	9. chapter nine

Sirius wakes up what feels like only moments later to an empty dark room. He's bleary and it's hard to make anything out in the pitch dark of the windowless room but he sees their clothing is still heaped together on the floor. 

Heat washes over him when he opens the door. Remus is standing in his shorts at a tall work table, his red back to the blazing brick oven. He reaches a hand out to Sirius when he sees him and Sirius shuffles over, his eyes still half-shut and tucks himself into Remus' hot side. 

"What're you doing?" he croaks in a still-asleep voice. 

"Some of us don't engage in the sin of sloth by sleeping all night." He shifts to press Sirius closer to him. 

Sirius noses along his warm throat, mouthing softly at the Adam's apple he's coveted for so long. "I'll help."

"Oh you will, will you?" he says, amused. 

"Mmm," Sirius says, enraptured by the feeling of his palms smoothing over Remus' sides. He stretches his hands out to span the soft length between Remus' ribs and hipbones, the tips of his fingers skimming the edges of the abraded skin on his back. He holds Remus there, that vulnerable place. 

Sirius feels Remus kiss his hair and sighs. He melts into the steady rise and fall of Remus breathing, presses his ear to his chest, feels his ribs press against his hands. He falls asleep a little, and wakes up to Remus sing-songing his name in his ear. "Alright," Sirius says. "Alright let's work."

Remus laughs at him and walks him backwards to a stool on the other side of the table. "You just sit here if you're going to insist on not going back to bed."

Sirius yawns. "And miss this?"

A large pot in the center of the table gives off the rich sour smell of yeast. Remus tends to little tasks around the kitchen: pots and plates and silverware that were drying are set in their right places, he sweeps some ash from the hearth, tends to the logs in the brick oven, adding a few more, herbs that have been bundled and left on the counter he strings up from a rafter. 

"Do you make the bread for Brother Marvolo?" Sirius asks.

"I make the bread for everyone."

"Do you ever think about poisoning it? A little monkshood. No one would know."

"Yes I'm sure no one would notice the extremely bitter taste."

"How do you know it's bitter? Why do you know about poisons?"

Remus lifts a heavy sack of flour onto the table with his strong, corded arms. "I grew up  _ here _ ."

"So, what? The monks trained you as an assassin?"

Remus laughs. "No, just, there's a lot you don't know about the brothers. Things used to be different here."

"Tell me. I want to hear about young Remus studying poisons." 

"I studied  _ everything _ ," Remus says, mixing flour into the bubbling mixture in the large pot. "I told you Brother Elphias was my tutor. You know, we're not the first clergymen with these proclivities."

"Brother Elphias?!" Sirius says, "No!"

"Yes," Remus says, his eyes sparkling. "And Abbot Albus."

"Together?!"

"Since forever, I'm half convinced that's why Abbot Albus has stayed away in Rome so long-- less suspicion. Anyway, Brother Elphias let me read anything, I'd stay in the library with him for hours. Did you know I can read Greek too? And when he had to travel Brother Amos would take me to the garden. It wasn't just medicine then, he used to sell cosmetics and perfumes, before Marvolo banned them." 

"Next you're going to tell me Brother Fabian was a prostitute."

"No, but he was an adulterer," Remus says slyly. "She was a beautiful woman, a Sister of St. John the Baptist. I think they still see each other sometimes. And you know he loves a generous cup of wine. He used to get rosy-cheeked and tell these wonderful stories."

The smile on Remus' face is so wistful Sirius feels a pang of hurt for him. "Tell me what it was like."

One strong arm stirring the giant pot of dough, Remus tells Sirius about spending lazy afternoons in the warm sunshine of the garden-- there was a cat that came around and Remus would save little bits of meat from his supper, and if he sat very still and quiet the cat would eat them right out of his hand. The yeasty froth in the bowl transforms into a stretchy mass and still Remus works it around and around tirelessly while he tells Sirius about eating sun-warmed figs right off the tree, eating so many of them once he got a stomachache and, thinking he'd be scolded, hid in the laundry tub all night. When the brothers found him they were so relieved they fed him a meaty bowl of stew and put him to bed. 

He covers the bowl with a wet cloth. He tells Sirius he was training with Brother Fabian, he was meant to start working in the library--"I had started transcribing the  _ Inferno _ . When I was younger I used to play a game pretending Virgil visited me and guided me everywhere"-- then the first fit. 

Remus says it simply, like it was inevitable but Sirius knows well the gasping pain of the unfulfilled, the gaping trench of it swallowing up Remus is too much.

"Was it Brother Marvolo?"

Remus smiles ruefully. "It was and it wasn't. It was gruesome, I had bitten my tongue and there was a lot of blood. Brother Marvolo didn't have to work very hard to convince everyone." 

"Hey," Remus says softly, coming around the table. "Don't do that." He pries open the fists Sirius didn't realize he was clinching and strokes his fingertips over the red nail marks in his palms. 

"I  _ hate _ him," Sirius chokes out.

"Shh, it's ok." Remus wraps his arms around Sirius and lets him grips tight onto him and cry, rocking him gently. Sirius doesn't think he's ever been touched like this; Remus is so tender, so  _ good _ \-- how could anyone?

"Why are they doing this?" Sirius knows about the money they're making, the power they're brokering, how they must enjoy the benefits of their righteous reputations around the monastery and in the city but… The cruelty of it is unfathomable, none of the explanations makes sense to him anymore. 

Sirius is still sniffling when Remus leans back, brushing the tears away with his palms. "Come on. Come help me with the bread. It will make you feel better."

Remus sprinkles a generous amount of flour and tips the dough out onto the table. He works so efficiently, cutting the dough into equal pieces and handing one to Sirius. "Like this," he says, pushing, folding, turning, pushing and Sirius tries to mimic him but he's too busy watching Remus' slim beautiful fingers coax the sticky mess into something smooth and elastic. Sirius watches the muscles in his arms and the tendons in his wrist as they rhythmically surface and sink again. He's breathless by the time Remus has finished shaping his second loaf. Remus slants him a little sideways glance, he knows exactly what he's doing to Sirius. 

"Is this what you meant by making me feel better?"

Remus ducks his head and smiles down at his dough. "I might have hoped. I've seen the way you stare at my hands." 

Sirius touches his fingertips to the back of Remus' wrist. "They're very beautiful hands."

"Finish your loaf so they can move on to their next task." 

Sirius kneads two loaves to Remus' five and watches him paddle them into the oven, the glowing orange wood crackling. Sirius realizes that what he thought were faint freckles on Remus' arms are from this, little cinders landing on his forearms. 

The dough in the oven, Remus ducks into the pantry for a moment and then grabs Sirius' hand and tugging him in his haste. "Come on."

"Is there time?"

"If we're economical, yes. Get undressed." 

"Oh Christ, you're so--"

"Kneel down here," Remus says.

Sirius waits with his arms on the bed and his knees on the stone floor, his senses effortlessly trained on Remus, skin prickling, already flushed and shaking, wondering what Remus will do. Remus runs hot palms down Sirius' thighs and spreads his legs and Sirius whimpers when he feels a slick, warm touch against his asshole. 

"Is that oil? From the larder?"

"It's laurel oil."

"Where--ah-- did you get that?" Sirius can hardly get the words out. Remus is rubbing light circles around his hole as his other hand smooths from Sirius' neck, down down, so slowly down over the curve of his ass, the length of his thigh, measuring him just for the pleasure of it.

"I didn't mention Brother Amos still makes certain… cosmetics?" 

Sirius moans, he might die of lust. Remus' touch and his irreverence and his raspy voice telling Sirius what he wants. His gorgeous fingers touching Sirius  _ there _ . 

Remus presses a finger inside him and the intrusion radiates warmth, Remus is so warm, burning, now he's pressing those sparks and cinders into Sirius, Sirius presses back into the sting of it, involuntarily clenching, more heat blooming out. "More," he whines. 

"Do you like it?"

"Yes fuck, I want more."

Remus moves closer behind Sirius, the length of his body hovering over Sirius. "Have you ever touched yourself here?"

"No."

"I have," Remus says. He pulls his finger out slowly and Sirius likes that even more. He presses back in, more oil, more fingers, more heat. "It feels so good Sirius…"

Sirius gasps, overwhelmed at the thought of Remus touching himself, of saying so unashamedly, that it was good, at the feeling from within him, centered where Remus is rubbing circles, at the image in his mind of Remus' fingers sliding inside him.

"I want to-- see," Sirius says and Remus says, "Get on the bed then," and Sirius climbs up, Remus following, over him, in him, his legs pushed up, and he can't see Remus' fingers at his hole but he can see Remus' forearm, tendons straining, and his expression like Sirius is the one slowly shattering him from the inside out. 

"You love looking don't you." And Sirius says, "Yes, yes," feeling like Remus, who sees Sirius looking, is seeing him whole in a way he hadn't realized he had always, always wanted someone to see. "You want to look at me," Remus tells him, and Sirius says "Yes," gasping because he's never wanted anything so much as to look and be allowed.


	10. chapter ten

The monastery is deserted; all the brothers and lay brothers are at the mass for the baptism of Archbishop Malfoy's "nephew." Everyone knows the child is his son, but for a month the brothers have been in such a frenzy of preparation for the opulent ceremony and sumptuous feast to follow that one might think the young Malfoy bastard was already canonized. A remark Sirius happened to make within earshot of Brother Severus, who banned Sirius from the festivities as if he had any interest in them in the first place. 

No, it's no great loss to Sirius to forego the pomp and circumstance honoring a certified cretin like Malfoy in favor of a few hours in Remus' bed. 

He's laying between Remus' long legs, resting his head in the wonderful space below one hipbone and tracing aimless circles around the other. Their bodies fit together so well-- fingers around wrists and tongues behind ears, his mouth on Remus' cock, the curve of Remus' ass so perfect when Sirius curls in behind him that Sirius thinks of missing ribs and smiles into Remus' neck. 

Remus scratches his fingers through Sirius' hair. Sirius has discovered Remus can do innumerable wonderful things with his hands. 

"What if we were somewhere else?" Sirius asks him, almost dozing.

"What do you mean? If we had met somewhere else?"

"No just somewhere else."

"I went to Assisi once for an Archbishop's mass," Remus says. "To the basilica there. I think you'd like it." And he tells Sirius about the hill it's upon, the golden fields around it dotted with red poppies, he tells Sirius about the rose window in white stone and inside, the blue ceiling with yellow stars, everywhere blue. 

Sirius says what if we lived at a hermitage? Just you and me and you would transcribe manuscripts and I would illuminate them and we'd grow our own herb garden and in summer wear no clothes at all.

Remus shows him what they would do at the hermitage wearing no clothes at all and after, Sirius falls asleep dreaming of being somewhere blue with Remus instead of these stark white walls.

***

The next morning Brother Fabian is waiting for him in the scriptorium. "You weren't in your bed last night."

"I was in garden. I feel asleep there."

"Son, at the very least, you could respect my intelligence with a believable lie."

Sirius hangs his head. 

"Oh don't look so miserable, you'll give me indigestion."

Sirius looks up at that and Brother Fabian sighs, exasperated. "What were you thinking?"

He was--is-- thinking about Remus. He's thinking about the disciples gathered together and told their beloved leader will be killed, and Remus imagining they all spend one last night laughing together. He shrugs.

Brother Fabian frowns at him, clearly disappointed in his answer. But then he keeps frowning and Sirius hears it too-- someone's running here.

Gideon rushes into the scriptorium. His face is red and he looks over his shoulder before leaning on the doorway. 

"What? What's happened?" 

"There's--" Gideon coughs, still catching his breath and Brother Fabian ushers him into his seat, fussing over him. 

Gideon is so worked up he doesn't seem to notice Sirius is in the room, or at least, it doesn't stopping him from sharing his news. "They've found two bodies, right outside Santa Croce-- the plague," Gideon says. 

Brother Fabian inhales sharply. "When?"

"Not an hour ago. Brother Marvolo, he's-- in the piazza, he's saying God sent the pestilence to Florence as a punishment for our vanity."

"Mary, Queen of Heaven," Brother Fabian says quietly.

"Everyone-- everyone, brother-- they've got carts going round, collecting vanities. They're building a pyre in the piazza right now."

"Sirius," Brother Fabian says urgently, "Go get Remus."

"What--"

" _Go_. If anyone stops you tell them I've summoned Remus for a scolding."

Sirius' ears are ringing but he has the presence of mind to walk unhurriedly as he makes his way through the corridors and arcades to the kitchen. Remus is sweeping out the ash when Sirius arrives. He smiles at Sirius, happy to see him and Sirius can't hold it together anymore. He stumbles into Remus and buries his face in his robes.

"Something-- something's happened. Brother Fabian is asking for you."

"What?"

Sirius' voice shakes, "It's the plague and, and Brother Marvolo is-- they're building a pyre for--"

Remus cups Sirius' cheeks, kisses him hard, and then grabs cloths he uses to haul home supplies, carefully tucking them under his outer robes and clasping his hands over his waist, eyes cast downward. Sirius is stunned for a moment by the transformation. 

Remus walks behind Sirius the way back to the scriptorium. Brother Fabian and Gideon are rushing back and forth from the library to the scriptorium, piles of books in their arms. Remus quickly sets to work gathering them onto the cloths he brought and tying up large bundles. 

"Where are they going?" Sirius asks, catching on. 

"Go through the shelves by my table," Brother Fabian says, "Anything they might burn you give to Remus." 

Gideon, having caught his breath, is quietly filling Brother Fabian in on all the details-- which families are throwing out their mirrors, their musical instruments, the expensive cosmetics, the manuscripts and paintings deemed too secular; the Malfoys have provided the carts; Brother Marvolo started preaching in the piazza early this morning; Botticelli is throwing his own works to the fire. Sirius inhales sharply at that one, and Remus looks up at him a moment, sharing his grief. 

When every book about temptation and pleasure is securely bundled, Brother Fabian starts clearing off his work table, all but dumping its contents on the nearby shelves before pushing the work table out from the wall and flipping up the rug that lay beneath it. There's a trapdoor. 

Remus lights a lantern and the plan that was dancing on the edges of Sirius' understanding coalesces. "Where does it lead?"

"Just follow Remus, he knows the way." 

Brother Fabian puts his hands on their shoulders, looking between Remus and Sirius solemnly for a moment, before stepping aside. Sirius can hear the beginnings of a prayer as he descends the earthen steps into the tunnel, two sacks of manuscripts slung over his shoulders. The trapdoor shuts over top of them and then there's just the quiet sound of their breaths and the damp air pressing in. 

"It's not very far," Remus says. "An hour or so."

"Where are we going?"

"To the Sisters of St. John the Baptist." Remus reaches for Sirius' hand for a moment, squeezing it.

They walk in silence through the tunnel, the walls are lined with brick but there's seeping water trickling down every few feet making Sirius nervous. The lantern casts flickering shadows against the walls and Sirius can't stop thinking about Botticelli's burning in the fire.

"How long has this tunnel been here?" Sirius asks, desperate for a distraction.

"I have no idea. I've heard all kinds of stories-- that it's from back when Florence still had a city wall, that Cosimo d' Medici had tunnels dug all over the city, from their palace to the Palazzo della Signoria to San Marco. Brother Fabian joked he dug it once, to get to his lady-love."

"She's at this convent? And the tunnel just happens to be underneath his work table?"

"I've gotten the impression some bargaining was involved."

"Is there anything else you're not telling me?" Sirius asks facetiously and is then surprised when Remus grins at him, obviously holding back a secret.

"The manuscripts you've been illuminating…"

"Yes..?"

"Brother Fabian has been using them to deliver messages. To people opposed to Brother Marvolo."

"No he hasn't!"

"He has! You've been distracted. Didn't you think it was odd there were so many?"

"I… No! How should I know how many manuscripts are commissioned at San Marco?"

"You might've glanced at the texts you were illuminating."

"I don't have time to read every one _and_ paint it."

Remus laughs. "Well anyway. Brother Fabian sends secret messages-- coordinating meetings, connecting like-minded people, setting up contingency plans…"

"Like this one."

The tunnel begins to slope slightly upward and the dripping damp improves. Sirius' shoulders are starting to ache, his fingers are stiff holding the knotted cloth. Remus does this at least one or twice a week, buying food the monks don't grow in the garden and supplies for the manuscripts and medicine. Sirius isn't surprised that Remus looks unfazed by the heavy load of manuscripts. And although it took him a while to catch on, he isn't surprised he and Brother Fabian were prepared for this to happen, that they had planned on the possibility. 

Sirius' anger rises up again, thinking about the men eager to burn music, art and knowledge. People who think that having knowledge is the same as acting on it, that thoughts themselves can be sins, who think the choice should be taken away. They would stand in Eden and refuse the fruit. They would trade their suffering for ignorance and do so with hubris. 

A tall woman who wears her habit like a crown is waiting for them at the end of the tunnel. She moves them through introductions with a stern efficiency-- Abbess Minerva, Sister Dorcas, Sirius, Remus.

"I think it's best if you're not seen in the Abbey at all. Sister Dorcas and I will take the manuscripts from here."

"What will happen to them?" Sirius asks, feeling a sense of loss, his part in protecting them over. 

"A friend of the cause will hold them on her estate for the time being. It's in Fiesole, away from the madness."

Sirius nods, sudden tears in his eyes and Abbess Minerva, no less stern in her countenance says, "Put me on my feet and I will give them their due!" Sirius recognizes the Psalm of David and tries to take heart.

Relieved of the manuscripts they... turn around. Sirius' shoulders feel lighter but his heart feels heavier. A pervasive heartache as if the weight of every vanity on the pyre-- the violins and lutes, the poetry, the bawdy tavern tales, the rouge and fine clothing, the _paintings_ \-- is pressing on his throat and chest. He can see the intertwining red, blue and purple on the edge of a page curling in the heat, he can see a blackened line advancing upon the gold of a decorated letter. 

Remus stops him with a hand on his arm. He looks like Sirius feels, like he would say something if there was anything to say. They stare at each other, witnessing their grief, sharing the unutterable.

  
In an instant Remus' expression shifts and he shoves Sirius into the wall of the tunnel, " _Fuck_ them. Damn them to hell. We're going to--" He kisses Sirius, hot and radiating, a one man pyre that Sirius lets consume him, feeling like he understands the ecstasy of Joan of Arc.


	11. chapter eleven

When Remus goes to open the trapdoor the rug has been rolled back over it. Remus carefully closes the door over them. 

"What's the matter? Can't we just move the rug?"

Remus shakes his head. "No it's-- that's the signal. If it was safe to go up he'd have left the rug rolled up."

"Shit."

"It's ok," Remus says. "It's ok. We just wait. We'll wait until it's dark."

"And then what?"

Remus has a pained expression on his face. "I'm not sure."

"Do you hear that? Is that footsteps?"

Remus nods slowly and Sirius mimes opening the trapdoor. Remus eases it open barely a crack, just a sliver--

They crouch on the stairs listening.

"I've had enough of you wasting my time." It's unmistakably Severus' deep voice.

"They meet in here! All the time I swear!" 

"I have more important things to be doing than searching out a couple of sodomites. Brother Marvolo will handle them through the Office." 

They hear quick footsteps, likely Severus sweeping out in his usual manner and then, "High and mighty prick." The second voice sounds familiar and Sirius frowns trying to place it. Remus mouths at him "Peter," and Sirius knows he's right. They wait for Peter's footsteps to fade away before lowering the trapdoor again and Sirius can finally let out several stanzas worth of curses.

"That little shit!"

Remus shrugs. "He's never liked me much."

"Why aren't you angrier?"

"Haven't you been expecting something like this?"

Sirius deflates. "I've been worried about the Office of the Night since I was thirteen. I just didn't expect-- certainly didn't think I'd be ousted by such a dim-witted little rat."

"You were hoping for a scandalous and sensational bit of public indecency?"

"At the very least. And fourteen different lovers named." 

They share a sad smile and settle in on the stairs to wait. 

In the dark tunnel the only indication that time is passing at all is the wick of their lantern. They sit with their arms wrapped around each other, trying to comfort each other with shaky kisses and even shakier words. Only last night they were lying in bed together dreaming of their own sunny place. Now they're in this dark hole, robes heavy with the damp, hunted and scared.

"What are we going to do?" Sirius asks him. 

Remus' face flickers like the meager light through several different emotions. "I don't know." He tightens his arms around Sirius. "I don't know but it was worth it."

Sirius presses his face into Remus' neck. "I wanted more time with you," he whispers.

The wick is sputtering when they hear footsteps again. There's a muffled sort of sound, like someone is rolling up the rug, and they douse the light and hurry off the stairs, hiding still and hardly breathing in the dark. 

A weak sliver of light slants down the stairs. "Remus?" 

Remus lets out a breath. "It's Brother Elphias. We're here, we're coming!"

The scriptorium is dark when they emerge from the tunnel, Brother Elphias having doused his lantern as well. "We have to be quick child."

"What's been happening?"

"Brother Marvolo has been appointed to several councils. They've a list of names. You have to leave San Marco."

Remus swallows and Brother Elphias reaches out for his hand. "You'll be back."

"Where are we going?" Sirius asks.

"There's an estate in Fiesole, they'll take you in."

Brother Elphias leads them to the door in the garden, it's usual fresh smell overtaken by smoke. "The bonfire has brought them all out into the streets. The Frateschi are patrolling."

"How can we possibly get out of town?" Sirius plucks at his robes, "They'll know us right away."

Brother Elphias reaches up to Sirius' forehead and traces a cross, "The Lord bless and protect you." Remus ducks his head to receive the same, the first tears in his eyes Sirius has ever seen. Remus embraces Brother Elphias for a long moment, mumbling something into his ear and Brother Elphias kisses him on the forehead and says, "I know child. Now off with you both."

They slip out into the streets, staying in the shadows, taking slim alleyways that reek of shit and piss. Crossing at the edge of an open piazza they can see the thick plume of smoke trailing away from the Piazza della Signoria. Sirius feels sick to his stomach but they keep moving. They haven't seen any Frateschi yet but they can hear them singing and shouting.

Sirius tells himself over and over they just need to get out of the city, if they can just get out of the city. 

Remus grabs Sirius' arm suddenly and hauls him back. He nods across the street where Sirius can just make out someone standing in the shadows of the alleyway diagonal from them. They wait, crouching, but the man doesn't move. 

Sirius turns back to whisper to Remus. "He could just be a drunk."

Remus shakes his head no and tips his head the direction they came from. They're doubling back, creeping sideways close to the wall when a band of carousing Frateschi stops in the street, one of them vomiting at the entrance to the alleyway. Sirius' can feel his pulse down to his fingertips. He squeezes Remus' hand and Remus' squeezes back, making the silent decision to take their chances with the man across the street.

When Sirius turns around he sees the man has stepped out of the alleyway and is flapping his hands at them, his thumbs curled together. Is he signaling to the group? The man darts across the street and into the shadows where they're hiding. Remus pins him against the wall, slapping a hand over his mouth.

The stranger's eyes go wide and he feebly flaps his hands at them again. 

"What are you doing?" Remus whispers, taking his hand slowly off the man's mouth. Sirius thinks he was right about the man being a drunk.

"It's-- it's an eagle, oh nevermind. I've just come from the Sisters of St. John the Baptist. Minerva told me to look out for two men trying to get out of the city." 

Sirius glances over at Remus who still looks wary. The man who vomited says something and the group laughs loudly.

"I'm James. Do you-- you must know my mother? Euphemia? Minerva said you would."

At that Remus' face clears. "A pleasure, James. We are trying to get out of the city."

"Hey! There's someone down there," one of the Frateschi shouts.

"There's a cart, two alleys to the right," James whispers frantically, before stepping out of the shadows and waving cheerfully at the man who shouted. 

Sirius and Remus hold their breath creeping out of the alley; Sirius can hear James saying something about taking a piss and then they're out on the street, flat out running. 

The cart is where James promised and they crawl underneath a tarp where there are several bolts of fabric and some very familiar looking cloth sacks. Remus reaches out and grips Sirius' hand tight while they wait for James, hardly breathing. 

***

They arrive in Fiesole just before sunrise. Sirius feels dead on his feet and he can see Remus' swaying, but they've made it. The manuscripts have made it too.

The quiet journey seems to have been a strain on James, who hasn't stopped chatting since they arrived. He takes them on an impromptu tour of the palazzo, showing them room after room, rooms painted with maps on every wall, and marble statues and so many paintings some are just leaning against the walls. Sirius feels dazed, like he's stared into the sun and is blinking spots from his eyes. 

"The whole way here I was thinking my mother is getting old and she needs someone to take care of the Chapel. I do my best taking care of her but really it's work enough for ten men. And, don't tell her I said this, but she's very dramatic, insisting she needs someone on hand to deliver last rites. No don't worry, it's all talk, she's hardly feeble. Still, she'll be very glad to know you're here." 

"I'm not ordained," Remus says.

James waves his hand dismissively, "Who needs to know? You're not going to be preaching at Santa Maria del Fiore."

"You want me to pretend to be a clergyman for your mother."

"Exactly. I think it's a wonderful idea." James continues their tour of the palazzo. Their grand inner courtyard, lush with orange trees and a sculpted grotto complete with fountains, the dining hall and receiving rooms, air flowing through the corridors even in the inner passageways. It certainly wouldn't be a hardship to hide out from Marvolo _here_.

"This is the library," James says, gesturing to a room and walking on. Remus stands in the doorway a moment before jogging to catch up.

"I'll be your fake clergyman," he says.

"Excellent. I hoped so."

"Not all of this is ours, it's just here for safe keeping. We've gotten a bit of a reputation, all hush hush of course. When it's gone my mother will be sad, I'm sure. She's loved having it, she's always saying she wants to die surrounded by beauty.

"She's been pestering me about having her portrait painted before, as she says, 'it's too late.' But I've hardly the time to find a decent painter with this mess happening, have I? I really ought to though, because, well, I'm courting a woman-- Lily, even more beautiful than the flower, you wouldn't believe-- and well, I'd like to have a betrothal portrait ready, a handsome one I hope. Then perhaps I'll need wedding portraits! And I'm sure my mother will want to replace some of the artwork we're only hiding. I can't tell you how many times she's mentioned wanting a Bacchus of her own."

James turns around, eyes sparkling at Sirius. "There really is so much painting to be done around here. I don't suppose you would want to keep up with an old widow's constant whims?"

"Are you serious?"

"Deadly. One day it's Bacchus, the next it's Judith and Holofernes. You'd be very busy."

Sirius feels like he's lived a week since he woke up this morning and he's having trouble putting together the events that led him to this palazzo with this eccentric man offering Sirius everything he's ever wanted-- patronage, patronage here with _Remus_.

He embraces James like a brother and James returns the gesture without hesitation. "You're a good man," Sirius tells him. 

"Oh reserve your judgements until after we've played Maglio, I'm terrible when I lose."

***

When the sun comes up Remus and Sirius are tucked into bed together, full of bread and butter and promises of protection-- "Don't worry, I have lots of practice hiding things. You'll be practically invisible." 

"Did you ever imagine we'd live together in an opulent palazzo?" Remus asks him, his words slurred a little.

Sirius laughs and curls into Remus' side. "I'd live in that tunnel with you, but this is nice."

"It'd be very dark in that tunnel, I'd miss seeing your face."

"I'd miss your hands."

"They're here," Remus says sleepily. "They're right here."

"They are, I don't have to miss them," Sirius says, and he whispers all the things they won't miss anymore into Remus' ear until he falls asleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yay!! it's finished! i have a short epilogue planned but i'm going to take a few days to recover from this marathon first. thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! i'm posting accompanying images on my tumblr @bigblckdog


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